End-of-Year Follies (Again) — Scrivener’s Error on, among other things, the Supreme Court’s recent decision to review both the DOMA and Proposition 8 cases. He makes an interesting point that would have completely escaped me as a non-attorney.

Strong opinions on climate change are self-reinforcing — Don’t believe it’s real? You won’t see local effects. As George Banks said in Mary Poppins, “Kindly do not attempt to cloud the issue with facts.” Which is pretty much the motto of the conservative movement these days, sadly for both them and the rest of us. Unfortunately, while its point is interesting, this article makes the far too common journalistic mistake of false equivalency, in attempting to appear balanced on a factual issue where there simply is no balance.

‘Barack the Destroyer’: Bryan Fischer’s Grand Unified Theory of Obama — See. This is why the reality-based community thinks conservatives are crazy. Bryan Fischer is a major figure in a major conservative organization saying things that would embarrass a strung-out bus stop mumbler with their batshit, wall-eyed insanity. And millions of his fellow conservatives believe him. There simply is no liberal-progressive equivalent of this kind of widespread conservative paranoid lunacy.

Republican Staffer Khanna Axed Over Copyright Memo — This how conservative epistemic closure is perpetuated at the policy level. A GOP staffer writers a memo analyzing an internal conflict between Republican positions on free market ideals and copyright law. Instead of responding to the critique or reconsidering conservative positions on the issue, the staffer is fired at the request of upset GOP officials. This is not the response of a political party interested in evidence-based reality. This is the response of denialist ideologues. At least Republican are consistent. Conservatism cannot fail you, only you can fail conservatism. (Snurched from Steve Buchheit.)

GOP’s politics unraveling before our eyes — As it approaches its rendezvous with the fiscal cliff, the Republican Party in Washington shows all the signs of a national nervous breakdown. I must confess that a lot of my schadenfreude in observing Republican disarray is colored by the unbearably smug Republican triumphalism we all had to endure during the heady days of the Permanent Majority. (Or as I like to call it, the Dozen Year Reich.) Which pretty much left me with a permanent bad taste in my mouth for the character of conservatives and their discourse. How’d that work out for you, Karl?

Arithmetic on Taxes Shows Top Rate Is Just a Starting Point — Yep. And budget math has never been the GOP’s strong point. Not with actual, you know, numbers. They got addicted to fantasy math as a result of the supply side economics fairy and Bush era spending sprees. As Paul Ryan said, it’s too complicated. Not only to explain, but to even perform. But then actual arithmetic is much like “facts” and “data”, it almost never favors the conservative view, and therefore can be disregarded.